Rear view mirrors both internal and external have developed over the years from being manually adjustable by the user from both inside and outside the vehicle, to being motorised and fully controllable (with multiple memorised and recoverable positions) from within the vehicle.
The typical arrangement of motors and control electronics, comprises motors located in the mirror housing usually behind the mirror glass with the associated electronic motor control circuit boards suitably small in size mounted adjacent thereto.
There has also been pressure on mirror designers to minimise the number of wires passing between both internal and external mirror assemblies and the internally located control switches and positioning levers. This constraint arises because the mirrors are an OEM product to the vehicle manufacturer and the less the manufacturer has to install and interface to the mirrors the better it is, as it lessens problems during design and manufacture.
However, the complexity of electronic circuits steadily increases as the number of functions associated with rear view mirrors increases, such as for example manually adjustable/rotatable lights, approach lights, retractability, memorised position setting and power folding. Therefore, since there are many rear view mirrors to control, the cost of providing these increasingly complicated circuits has also steadily increased. A mirror assembly that contains expensive electronics is clearly more costly to replace when damaged than if the mirror assembly did not contain those electronic control circuits. In a competitive market high prices for sophisticated products are not always readily acceptable and neither is it acceptable for replacement parts to be unnecessarily expensive. Locating expensive electronic in relatively safe environments will avoid costly replacement in the event the external mirror assembly is damaged.
It is an object of the invention to provide a more economical arrangement for the control of motorised and feature rich rear view mirrors, which is simpler and more robust in design and does not have the drawbacks of presently known systems.